| Although simulationists study complicated resources---bank tellers, customers, assembly lines, weaponry, and so forth---they often capture little of the sophistication or variability in the real-world entities. Simulationists may struggle first to identify the salient resource characteristics to model and then to represent those characteristics in code. Simulation languages and environments offer insufficient help for modeling resources, and coding them in a general-purpose programming language can be tedious and error-prone. A new domain-specific language called the Resource Definition Language (RDL) offers significant assistance in the collaborative modeling of resources. A new language translator converts programs written in this language into a database built using industry standards. A new Application Programming Interface built for this database facilitates the extraction of resource information for purposes such as automatically generating code for simulations. Together, these contributions can improve communication between programmers and consumers of experimental results, improve the quality of resource models, reduce the effort required to create resource models, improve the validity of simulation experiments, and promote reuse of knowledge about and models of resources. |
